Evan Narcisse

Nintendo's fighting on two fronts. The first, very real
battleground they're waging war on is in retail, where their Wii U home console
is struggling to build a user base. The second area of struggle has been in the
hearts and minds of observers trying to decide how
much faith to put into the company's foresight. The House of Mario offered
one possible answer to both conundrums: whether handheld or home console, all
their hardware's going to operate under a unified vision, much like the family
of Apple products.

Last night was the night that Nintendo told investors—and the world—how they're going to meet…
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In a recent investor Q&A, Nintendo president Satoru
Iwata told attendees that the two internal teams that make handheld and console
hardware have been merged with each other:

Previously, our handheld video game devices and home video
game consoles had to be developed separately as the technological requirements
of each system, whether it was battery-powered or connected to a power supply,
differed greatly, leading to completely different architectures and, hence,
divergent methods of software development. However, because of vast
technological advances, it became possible to achieve a fair degree of
architectural integration. We discussed this point, and we ultimately concluded
that it was the right time to integrate the two teams.

Iwata then talked about the changes that Nintendo hopes to
have happen as a result, like having more titles for subsequent hardware launches:

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For example, currently it requires a huge amount of effort to
port Wii software to Nintendo 3DS because not only their resolutions but also
the methods of software development are entirely different. The same thing
happens when we try to port Nintendo 3DS software to Wii U. If the transition
of software from platform to platform can be made simpler, this will help solve
the problem of game shortages in the launch periods of new platforms. Also, as
technological advances took place at such a dramatic rate, and we were forced
to choose the best technologies for video games under cost restrictions, each
time we developed a new platform, we always ended up developing a system that
was completely different from its predecessor. The only exception was when we
went from Nintendo GameCube to Wii. Though the controller changed completely,
the actual computer and graphics chips were developed very smoothly as they
were very similar to those of Nintendo GameCube, but all the other systems
required ground-up effort.

The Nintendo boss also articulated how he hopes future
Nintendo products will behave more like "brothers," instead of, say, cousins.

However, I think that we no longer need this kind of effort
under the current circumstances. In this perspective, while we are only going
to be able to start this with the next system, it will become important for us
to accurately take advantage of what we have done with the Wii U architecture.
It of course does not mean that we are going to use exactly the same
architecture as Wii U, but we are going to create a system that can absorb the
Wii U architecture adequately. When this happens, home consoles and handheld
devices will no longer be completely different, and they will become like
brothers in a family of systems.

Currently, we can only provide two form factors because if we had three or four different architectures, we would face serious shortages of software on every platform. To cite a specific case, Apple is able to release smart devices with various form factors one after another because there is one way of programming adopted by all platforms. Apple has a common platform called iOS. Another example is Android. Though there are various models, Android does not face software shortages because there is one common way of programming on the Android platform that works with various models. The point is, Nintendo platforms should be like those two examples. Whether we will ultimately need just one device will be determined by what consumers demand in the future, and that is not something we know at the moment. However, we are hoping to change and correct the situation in which we develop games for different platforms individually and sometimes disappoint consumers with game shortages as we attempt to move from one platform to another, and we believe that we will be able to deliver tangible results in the future.